I will be the first to admit it: you tend to eat at restaurants closer to your home than ones you must make an effort to get to. I don’t live thaaaaat close to Bellevue’s HoneyFire BBQ, but close enough.

The three peaks of meringue hint at the marshmallows you melted on a summer’s night, as a little kid, but just a bit softer, a bit lighter, browned, I bet, with a quick drive-by from a blow torch.

Moving from one city to the next is usually a well thought-out decision. Inertia being what it is, few of us pick up and leave just for the hell of it.

Pepperoni, sausage, ham, bacon, salami and ground beef. I can’t tell you exactly how the alchemy works, but climbing over each other, these six artery-clogging morsels of magnificence transform a slice of West Nashville pizza.

There’s not a lot of any one thing in it, but enough of everything. And it’s sized for the European that’s buried somewhere deep inside many of us, whether we want to admit it or not.

This is simplicity itself, a 9″-long, 2″-tall, 2″-deep two-hander topped by a crisp, puffed-out seal of skin, with striations of meat and fat, meat and fat, meat and fat. You can slice half of it up easily, and eat the rest down to the bones like the caveperson you once were.

It’s not the beer you’d drink watching the landscapers cut your lawn. It is exactly the kind of ice-cold beer you’d want after cutting the lawn yourself.

There are few foods more personal in the South than banana pudding. Every restaurant in Nashville seems to offer it, many that do call it “The Best,” and they are all just … wrong.
(See, I told you it was personal.)

Is it stuffed cabbage? On a deconstructed level, perhaps, but no, not really. No rice, for example, and it’s a soup, there’s no getting around that. But, whoa. I may no longer care.

On the south side of the 440, Degthai has become Nashville’s Thai trendsetter in almost no time at all. One visit, and it will be tough to go back to your neighborhood place.